


Unexpected Consequences

by afterandalasia



Category: Twilight (Movies), Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Body Horror, Book: Breaking Dawn, Canon Compliant, Dark, F/M, Half-Vampires, Movie: Breaking Dawn Part 1, POV Carlisle, POV Outsider, Sparklepires, Twilight Spitefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-30 00:04:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As soon as Carlisle heard Alice running for her phone, he knew that something was wrong.</p><p>As soon as he heard Bella's words, he started to realise just how wrong things were.</p><p> </p><p>[Carlisle's side of the phone conversation with Edward, during Breaking Dawn Ch. 7 "Unexpected".]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unexpected Consequences

The first warning that I had was Alice flying for her phone.

It had taken a certain amount of persuading to make sure that she did not call Bella or Edward during their honeymoon. They needed their privacy, I said, and when Alice began to complain about the loss of contact with her brother and friend for a month I put my foot down. Unless there was an emergency, we were _not_ to initiate contact with them. If they wanted to talk to us, they knew our numbers.

When Alice ran through the house to her phone, and started dialling frantically, I looked up from the journal article which I had been reading, and listened intently. When her call went straight to voicemail - to _Bella's_ voicemail - I was out of my seat and down the stairs before she had even cut off the call.

"Alice! What's going on?"

Her eyes flickered to mine for an instant, wide and glassy-dark, then back to the phone as she dialled again. Even from this angle, I could see that it was Edward's number, and I opened my mouth to question it again as Alice held up a finger for me to be silent.

Pressing my lips tightly together again, I waited. Each ring seemed to cut through the air, and I could not help a moment of irritation with Alice. She could have explained to me what was happening by now; then again, the fact that Edward had not yet answered the phone was troubling in itself.

Finally, an answer; the pattern of breathing was enough to betray who it was. _"Hi, Alice,"_ Bella said. Her voice was slightly hoarse, and unconsciously I assigned it to a sore throat, not worrying by itself but to be watched.

“Bella? Bella, are you okay?” I watched Alice's face carefully, seeing the worry there that was not so clearly betrayed in her steady voice.

_“Yeah. Um. Is Carlisle there?”_

I held out my hand for the phone, giving Alice a stern look. Her face dropped slightly, but for a moment she held out. "He is. What's the problem?"

_"I'm not... one hundred percent... sure..."_

Each hesitation felt achingly long, and still I stood with my hand outstretched. They had been there for over two weeks now, and Bella should have been turned. Clearly, that was not the case, and it begged the question as to why. I wanted to ask Edward, and besides that to know what had caught Alice's attention.

"Is Edward all right?" Alice's head cocked to the side slightly, as though tilting an ear for Bella's answer. Had she seen something in Edward's future? She refused to meet my eyes, pulling the phone away for a moment to say, "Carlisle..." as if I was intruding on her. Although I usually tried to refrain from anger, this time I could not help feeling a flicker of it as she looked at me for an instant, pleading, before half-turning away again. "Why didn't he pick up the phone?"

_"I'm not sure."_

Alice took a deep breath to fuel her words, but it was still almost as if she was trying to wash away some taste. "Bella, what's going on? I just saw-"

She cut herself off, and I saw her lips press together tightly. Her eyes, fixed on the middle distance, had a hollowness to their stare, a darkness which showed even through the current bright gold.

_“What did you see?”_

I could hear Bella's breaths, slightly unsteady, at the far end of the phone line as both she and I waited for Alice's answer. Alice looked up towards the ceiling, her lips twitching as if she was about to speak, then she shook her head to herself and pressed her eyes tightly closed. “Here’s Carlisle,” she said after a moment, her voice sounding strained to my ears.

Finally, she reached out and handed the phone to me, and I put it to my ear with more speed than grace. "Bella, it's Carlisle," I said, as if this would somehow be necessary. "What's going on?"

Though I spoke to her, my eyes were fixed on Alice, the question for both of them. Unfortunately, neither gave me an answer.

_"I... I'm worried about Edward. Can vampires go into shock?"_

Of course not, I almost told her. Circulatory shock relied upon the presence of blood, and vampires were nowhere near as inclined to psychological shock as humans. The sheer weight of time upon the mind gave it an inertia which was difficult for anything but the greatest of events to overcome. I could hear the slight tremble in her voice, though, and how she laid out the question as a diversion.

"Has he been harmed?"

I threw the question towards her, wanting more to know how she would respond. There were few things in the world that could have harmed Edward, and I could think of just about none that would have left Bella unharmed.

_"No, no, just taken by surprise."_

"I don't understand, Bella" I said quietly.

 _"I think... well, I think that... maybe... I might be..."_ A deep breath, preparing. _"Pregnant."_

Fool boy. Fool, fool boy. The agreement had been made to change Bella. Then again, doubtless I was ten times the idiot for not giving them every warning that I could have done. I pressed my fingertips to my forehead and grimaced, holding very still for a moment before I spoke again.

"When was the first day of your last menstrual cycle?"

 _"Sixteen days before the wedding."_ Her answer was so calm, so very sure, that it left me suppressing a shudder.

There were few questions that I needed to ask. “How do you feel?”

 _“Weird,”_ she replied, her voice cracking. I felt a weight settle onto my shoulders as she continued to talk, voice shaking but with an underlying fervour of certainty. It had been so many years since I had heard those sort of words. _“This is going to sound crazy — look, I know it’s way too early for any of this. Maybe I am crazy. But I’m having bizarre dreams and eating all the time and crying and throwing up and... and... I swear something moved inside me just now.”_

I couldn't find the words to reply, my tongue tied in my mouth. My free hand curled at my side, so tightly that I heard skin scrape on skin. Finally, though, Bella sighed and spoke again.

_"Um, I think Edward wants to talk to you."_

"Put him on."

I tried not to count the fractions of seconds until the phone was in Edward's hands, and he spoke. He seemed unable to raise his voice above a whisper. _"Is it possible?"_

"Edward," I said, more calmly than I felt, "I need you to listen to me very carefully. I will not waste time. Yes, the reproduction of vampires with humans is possible. It was thought to be a myth even at the time that I studied with the Volturi, but whilst I was there they came across stories of them. Even evidence that they almost came to be. We never managed to track any of them down, however, and it is entirely unknown what was created by such a union. Do you understand me?"

I stilled my breathing, eliminating the faint noise of it in case it might mask something that he said.

_"And Bella?"_

Of course, his concern went straight to her. But I did not want to tell him what I had seen, the horrors that this thought conjured up.

"One thing emerged among the stories: the women became aware of their pregnancy very early on, and they were unnaturally certain of it. Remember, Bella has _no reason_ to think that she might be pregnant, and yet from her voice... she has already made up her mind on the matter. She knew before she even rang me to talk about it."

I rubbed one hand across my brow. The images were still written perfectly in my vision. We had been in Volterra, in October 1714, when we had heard the rumour of woman unnaturally pregnant only a short distance away in an area that was then known as the _Repubblica di Ragusa_. We arrived too late to track down any vampire that might have been to blame, or to save the woman: she was beyond the town, her body broken from the inside out.

I could not have avoided remembering her if I had tried. Her body had worn almost skeletally thin, the shapes of her bones on show. Her hair had been ripped out in chunks that showed her scalp, and her fingers were bloody, nails torn away. She was paled, anaemic to the point that even there had been barely any blood spilt - and this despite the way that her belly was torn open. No, not torn: ripped. Her skin had been rent apart, faint ripples of stretch marks giving way to wide gashes. Beneath them lay a shell, inhumanly hard to the touch, and after debate it was decided to break it open.

The creature inside had look something like a human child, and something like a vampire. The skin felt soft to us, but not as much as a human's, the shape the same as either of us. Its eyes were brown, the hair on its head thicker than might be expected from a human infant, but it was small and thin, stiff in our hands. When Felix had squeezed it hard, it had crumbled in large fragments in his hands.

It had been dead, had felt so dead that it made set us all on edge just to be near it. We, who had no heartbeats, felt uncomfortable even as it burned. Even Aro's deep curiosity had not swayed him to bring it back to Volterra for study.

The thought flashed through my mind it what would have seemed only an instant to a human, but I knew that Edward would have caught my hesitation all the same. "If Bella is convinced that she is pregnant with such a being, then that is the surest sign of all. You must get her back here, Edward, as soon as possible. We have no idea what might happen next."

 _"Yes,"_ said Edward. _"Yes, I will."_

Without waiting for anything more from me, he ended the call. I stood there for a moment longer, phone still at my ear with the dead tone coming from it, before slowly lowering it to my side. The slightest of footsteps in the doorway behind me bought my attention back, and I turned. "Alice."

"Carlisle."

It was so easy, sometimes, to forget that they were not children. They were still young to me -- even Edward, a lifetime old to humans, was still far my junior. I, in turn, was a young to the Volturi leaders, to the Romanians. But that did not make any of us children, and it did not mean that we were fools. Should not have meant that we were.

"What did you see?"

Her brows furrowed, lips trembling, and I rather thought that were she human she would be near to tears. But tears were one of the things denied to us. "Bella has vanished," she said quietly. "I can't see her. Edward... comes and goes, but he is vanishing quickly as well. It's like being underground, in true and complete darkness."

I did not ask how she knew such things. We had that much agreed between us. "A pity -- I do not know what might be coming next, either." Now she met my gaze, worried. "I will explain once we are all here. Have hope, though. You still had your visions of her as a vampire, and there is no reason to believe yet that they will not come true."

Perhaps she heard my uncertainty, or perhaps it sounded as if I spoke outright lies. I could not be sure. In any case, Alice gave me a thin smile, and said nothing.

We knew when to stop asking questions of each other.


End file.
